Bestowed upon a select group, the title of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the favorable side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel compelled to justify even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such titles can confine a creative to a very narrow courtyard, pursuing exclusively material worthy of a Acclaimed Auteur; another is that the disappointment when a project fails to ignite is even more pronounced. A notable example has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if messages from film buff friends are any guide – seems nailed on for only one award this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must examine the filmmaker's trajectory. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of broad, agile genre films: motorcycle drama The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the timeless Keanu/Swayze actioner Point Break. A sharper insight of her artistic path came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, influenced by the events surrounding Rodney King, which also served as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to find refuge in the simulated environment. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her former husband and collaborator James Cameron, currently prepping the release of Avatar 3.) Yet post-2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty broached America’s recent military engagements in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s extended past of racism.
It's easy to see why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who penned Netflix’s latest show starring Robert De Niro Zero Day – and why the service would strongly support a nuclear-panic thriller after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
High Points and Low Points
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, describing in something like real time the brief period in which a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific region by unidentified actors is picked up on screens of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the presidential command center, en route towards what everyone learns is its objective: central Chicago. In this initial part, Bigelow and Oppenheim rapidly increase the drama while engaging in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re made to question where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the countdown clock reaches zero.
The outcome – and here’s where the disappointments begin – is a return to the start: the film later moves between the angles of those senior officials (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction briefly seen or mentioned. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to rehash the opening section again and again, each pass trowelling on moot procedural points while inching everyone nearer the dreaded big bang. Previous Bigelow films had a strong control on action and consequence; her most successful works as a Acclaimed Auteur, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the inciting incident is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Visual and Thematic Shortcomings
While the plot spins in ever decreasing circles, like a pessimistic time loop, we’ve sufficient moments to consider the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the aesthetic of American cinema. Even on the big screen, Dynamite seemed flatly familiar, Barry Ackroyd’s cursory handheld lensing reminiscent of 24 or The West Wing or recent Netflix content reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Esteemed Stylistic Director fades away, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, outlined in that initial segment as perhaps an additional of this director’s tough-minded working women, exits prematurely, so once more it’s left to a collection of stern males to try to prevent the world’s end. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes vanishes with her; maybe after Detroit’s financial shortfall, the artist felt she had to curb her bold choices, but a script this talky required some compensatory pyrotechnics.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most potently evokes, then, isn’t atomic destruction, but a artist's anxiety of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and virtually solidifying as it progresses, it’s hardly surprising the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay takes for granted is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the largest risk to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from some place other than the White House. Where prior Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s latest projects to fall somewhere between afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly out of touch. It’s lacking in drama by design: even before the stray rocket first is detected, the nation Bigelow’s film portrays has been shattered completely.
